I lived in Vancouver for 13 years happily but was forced to leave my rental after a flood and could not find new housing. Here is my story.
Our house, what I described as to my husband as “Heaven on Trout”, was a 1970s built bungalow on the edge of John Hendry Park (Trout Lake) in East Vancouver, with a large bay window overlooking the poplars that sway in the summer breezes and the winter storms. It was a dream rental. In order to find it I had spent a month walking around the neighbourhood, knocking door-to-door looking for vacancies. In my womb I carried my daughter, only a tiny fetus, and there was no amount of walking or knocking that would be too much to find the perfect home to give birth to her and raise her. When I walked past “Heaven on Trout” I noticed that the house was empty, so I walked to the door, peeped in the windows and knew in that moment it had to be mine. I rummaged through the mail to find names and addresses of previous tenants that I failed to track down, so I resorted to knocking on the neighbhours door. A neighbour had the owners number, so I called him on the spot and said “I want to rent your house. Can we meet?” He asked, “How did you know it was for rent?” “I’m friends with…” I covered the phone to ask the name of the neighbhour, Shirley, “Shirley gave me your number, she says the house in empty.” I met the owner, a young Chinese restaurateur who had inherited the responsibility of caretaking the place for his parents. The rent was expensive for us at $1,500/month, having lived in a 2-bedroom apartment in East Van for $1,000/month, but we negotiated that I would manage the basement suite in exchange for collecting every third month’s rent. It was agreed and we moved in with no contract, just a handshake.
After a year we got a roommate brining our rent down to $1,000/mnth, plus the income from the basement suite. It was a lot of work, managing the basement and sharing our 1,000 square foot space with a roommate, but we made it work and our rent worked out to be $666.70/month. On our single income this allowed me to be a student and a stay-at-home mom to my daughter who was born in front of the old fireplace ablaze on a cold January morning. Everyone said that I was lucky, but I would quickly explain the efforts that I had to make to keep living cheap: finding tenants, dealing with complaints, fixing toilets and furnaces, cleaning up after tenants who do not respectfully move-out, living with another adult with their needs, desires and habits But that was the sacrifice I made to be able to stay at home with my kid. Around the time we got a roommate, we also decided to buy land on the Sunshine Coast. My husband wanted to own something, to have a place we could dream of building a house one day, a place of our own. So my father sold us half his property and we worked out a private mortgage with him where would pay $600/month until the debt was paid off. This meant our housing budget was now $1,266.70/month, about what our friends were paying for their East Van apartments in 2012.
In December 2015 I was eight-months pregnant with my second child. I got a phone call from my landlord: “You can’t be there anymore, it’s not safe. You should move.”
When the water started to pour in the month previous I knew it was the end. The house was old, it had not been maintained, the water always coming up to the door of the basement in heavy rain and annual drain flushes being organized, the roof noticeably far beyond repair, always the smell of damp below ground and a cellar in the back we called the “murder room” which was painted red and often had a puddle of water forming on the floor.
Our two families stayed up late at night pumping the floodwater from the low points of the house to the drain, but it was to no avail. It kept pouring in threatening to breach the subfloor and destroy all the contents of the suite. I was in denial and hired a remediation company to cost out the repairs but the job was too major for us to stay. So when my landlord stated the obvious, I said “Of course, we’ll start looking for another place right away.” I hung up the phone and began to cry.
I set out to find a new perfect home, but this time in my womb I was not carrying a tiny fetus, but was nearly ready to give birth to a fully developed baby, our second daughter. There was no time for walking, for knocking on doors and rummaging through strangers mail. This time I was using craigslist, kajiji and word-of-mouth. This time, there wasn’t a variety of multi-room rentals in East Vancouver ranging from $1,200-$1,500 a month. In fact, the report put out by the Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation at the time suggested the vacancy rate was near zero. Now the new bottom price for two bedrooms was lingering around $2,000/month, especially those above ground. We found one place advertised at $1,100/month, a whole house set to be demolished in a 6-months and we thought, OK, that buys us time. My husband called and the landlord said “I have to tell you, it’s a real shit hole.” We found three separate newly renovated 2 bedrooms in East Van, all around 650-800 sq feet for $2,400/month but when I called to ask to see the place, each turned me away saying “It’s not suitable for a family.” Then we found another teardown and thought it sounded promising. They were asking for $1,950/month, which is steep for us, but hey, it was $50 below that $2,000 mark. When we walked in we could smell the mold, worse than our underwater basement suite and there were large dark circles of rot in the wood paneling on the walls. When we opened the door to the “sunroom” we could see it was so black with mold and rot that the floor had collapsed and the smell was horrendous. The owner explained: “We just won’t include that room.” Then he remarked, “Maybe this place isn’t good for children?” I replied, “This isn’t good for humans and no one should be living here!!!”
My husband and I walked to our car in silence, sat down and stared ahead at a bleak horizon. “We can’t live in Vancouver,” I said. He replied, “No. I guess we’re moving to the Sunshine Coast.” And that was it. The next day we rented a four bedroom with an ocean view and huge yard for $1,100/month in the town of Powell River where we own our land.
We moved and I gave birth to my second daughter beside a woodstove with a view of the forest. We thought we had found shelter, but with us traveled a tide of others leaving Vancouver and the rental market reached zero vacancy in Powell River too! After 6-months of newborn bliss, my husband commuting to Vancouver for work, we were given notice that the house had sold. We started to look for rentals in Powell River but the prices had gone up 50% in just 6 months! We would have to pay the same price as our apartment in Vancouver for a place in Powell River, but a place where there are no jobs to support the rental prices.
So we took a bold move. We decided to buy a yurt and put it on our property in Powell River which had water and sewer services but no house. The yurt would provide immediate shelter while we worked on our long-term plan to build a house.
And here we are today, two and half years later. We still live in our yurt and building a house seems an impossible feat with the price of development. The city of Powell River does not allow modular housing, tiny houses or other more affordable housing options. So once again we are stuck. We are working class people and there are no solutions to our housing situation.
Please please please consider:
- more drastic progressive taxes such as land value tax that would make rentals way cheaper.
- make it easier for owner-builders to build alternative houses that have been used for years to provide affordable housing such as cordwood masonry and cob or more modern solutions such as modular housing and tiny houses
- drastically increase the amount of social housing available so that the little guys at the bottom aren’t being squeezed to death by the heavy weights that created this nightmare system of housing.
